Complex Wordiness (一些冗余表达的复杂情形)
1. Belaboring the Obvious (过度说明那些显而易见的内容)
1a. Imagine a picture of someone engaged in the activity of trying to learn the rules for playing the game of chess.
1b. Imagine someone trying to learn the rules of chess.
2a. When you write down your ideas, keep in mind that the audience that reads what you have to say will infer from your writing style something about your character.
2b. Keep in mind that your readers will infer from your style something about your character.
You can write down only ideas; your audience can read only what you have to say; you write only to them; they can infer something about your character only from your writing. (你写下的自然是想法;你的读者自然是读你写下的内容;)
2. Excessive Detail (过多的细节)
How much detail we should provide depends on how much our readers already know. In technical writing addressed to an informed audience, we can usually assume a good deal of shared knowledge. (到底提供多少细节取决于目标读者的知识背景。如果是向有相应知识储备的读者介绍技术性的文本,可以忽略很多基础性的知识细节。)
We signal that we are members of a community in what we say and how we say it. But a more certain sign of our socialization is in what we don't say, in what we take for granted as part of a shared but rarely articulated body of knowledge and values. (说什么和怎么说,已然表明了 一个人的社群背景。不过,一个更能揭示个体的社群属性的特点在于知道什么可以不说,在于明晰哪些是不言自明的常识和价值观。)
1a. Baseball, one of our oldest and most popular outdoor summer sports in terms of total attendance at ball parks and viewing on television, has the kind of rhythm of play on the field that alternates between the players' passively waiting with no action taking place between the pitches to the batter and exploding into action when the batter hits a pitched ball to one of the players and he fields it.
1b. Baseball has a rhythm that alternates between waiting and explosive action.